For Better or Worse

I'm growing more and more fascinated by the details coming out in this election. Maybe it's just a reflection of me getting older, but the actual dynamics are fascinating. The Obama-Hillary primary was the most interesting primary I can remember. I think I was a little out of it when Clinton got elected - I suppose I was only 14 years old, so how much could I expect to know? But the theme that seems to be coming out - for better or worse - and is solidified by McCain's VP choice - a new generation is taking over.

I don't know the technical years of the Baby Boomers vs. Generation X, but the entire frame of debate is shifting and no longer is dominated by the Baby Boomer character. This is a Generation X debate. Sure, the Boomers are very much still relevant, will hold positions of power, and wield incredible economic influence. But another Generation has been thrust into the spotlight because of an overwhelming fatigue with the contentious nature of the Vietnam/Civil Rights/Watergate/Reagan dynamics which have defined politics for so long now...

At some point - probably with Vietnam - the Greatest Generation realized their time had passed. The world had entered a different age - an age of nuclear weapons, third world revolutions, distrust of authority at home. I'm sure it didn't make sense to a generation who lived through the Depression and World War 2 - fighting for food and jobs and later fascism in massive land wars requiring incredible human sacrifice.

It seems to me we're at another shift. The world got different and it doesn't fit into the traditional right/left box anymore. Old forces try to fit and squeeze it into the old narratives of anti-war Vietnam or trickle down economics or Civil Rights. But those issues, while not dead, are exhausted and newer issues have surfaced (or resurfaced) depending on how you want to describe them.

This new era, I think, will not be defined in Manichean terms. Our politics and world, in the past 50 years or so, largely fit into this box. Foreign relations were defined by the Cold War - an epic taking of sides to avoid possible nuclear annihilation. Politics and policy positions were defined as Pro or Con. Democrat or Republican. Red and Blue. Pro-war, Anti-war. This is how the debate has been framed, issues discussed. But the world no longer can be accurately defined in those terms. They were useful for a certain time, but the framing devise simply doesn't work anymore. It leads to heads banging against the wall in frustration, like an insoluble math equation without adding proper variables to both sides of an equation.

What will characterize this new world is asymmetry. People, states, business, government will be in constant flux trying to seize small pieces of the pie from thousands of other actors in various spheres. Big lumbering organizations will be targets of smaller, defter organizations, which themselves will be targeted internally and externally by other organizations looking to leverage themselves with or against the current. Incredible new tools will be wielded and appropriated for non-intended use to further the interests of big and small groups of people and states.

We've seen it already in business, in war, in sports, it's all around us all the time.

Maybe it's always been this way, but the past felt more like a system of patronage vs a system of asymmetry. Patronage in that smaller actors sucked up to larger actors to get a piece of the pie. In foreign relations, small nations sucked up to superpowers. In the workplace, you sucked up to your bosses for work and promotions. In business, you sucked up to the big pockets to get funded.

Now it all seems like managing chaos. Trial and Error. Leveraging assets in different ways than they were intended. A couple of examples off the top of my head:

AOL bought Time Warner. This ended up failing and falling apart, but how in the hell did an internet business with no-profit purchase one of the largest media organizations in the world?

The Oakland A's. In the late 90s and early 2000s the A's won more regular season games than any other team in baseball except the New York Yankees, despite having one of the lowest payrolls and in an era where the distribution of payrolls for big market teams vs small market teams increased mightily.

Al Queda, an organization of a couple of 1000 men living in caves declared war against the US and haven't yet been officially defeated.

And it's all still happening right now. The US military is being used as back up police to help the Arabs defeat their terrorist plotters. Our military wasn't designed for this. Yet, they're being adaptive to the threats we face.

*Going to have to continue this post at another time.